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How to make an old house a new home.
1. Love it. That means, as in any love affair weightier than idle fantasy, look beyond its appearance for goodness. Look beyond the dusty broken vinyl siding. Knock on its old hard wood walls and ask them how they’re doing. Declutter the wires, generations of wires for cable and free the house of those black lines.
2. Forget the old dryer in the basement, and hang your clothes out on the back porch, the front porch, the fence, tie a line from the neighbors’ tomato plants reaching up over the old wooden fence to the garage and back toward the alley. Clothes waving in the feeble sunlight is happiness in any language.
3. Plant 19 bushes and trees that are local-appropriate. The squirrels and butterflies and worms and birds will rejoice, instantly. They will join you in making your new home joyful, and healthy. Put a bird bath out for them to drink out of, and change the water up.
4. Save water. Save it in the sink, in buckets. Then take those buckets or bowls—from the shower, from the sink, from the dripping shower head, from the bath tub when its been used…outside and pour the water on the happy thirsty plants and veteran old bushes and flowers and trees, all. Saving water means using non-toxic soap, everywhere. Biodegradable, healthy soap. Epsom salts (not salt) in water are something that plants love. Don’t toss your salted pasta water out there, though.
5. Clean. If you don’t clean yourself, hire an eco cleaner who favors vinegar and baking soda over toxic chemicals, which may clean but also simultaneously are worse than most any dirt or grime. Clean that dust up, it’s full of lead paint and karma and clean floors and walls and light fixtures and kitchen and toilet and bath…this will make your family happy and keep them healthy. That includes your dog, or cat, who spend most of their time in the places where dust likes to lie.
6. Find old fixtures in the basement and get them rewired and hang the grand-again chandelier in the living room over the mantle and buy beautiful antique fixtures and get them rewired by a friendly grump local gentleman who too loves quality and old things…and new fixtures if made well and locally and they’re classic and quality and simple or exuberant, and hang them up. Hang church chandeliers over the dining table you bought off Marketplace for $40 including drop-off and lifting it in. The vanilla-warm light from the chandeliers will make evenings warm and cozy and elegant.
7. Don’t buy single-use plastic. There is no “away.” Let our homes be places that don’t just look wholesome, but are wholesome. Don’t buy dead and tortured animals for your pleasure. Let our kitchens be places of healthy, planet-restoring peace and joy, not ignored-suffering and casual pollution. Meat and Dariy and Plastic is good for none of us, and its normalization fools us into thinking it’s okay. It’s not okay. It’s sad.
8. Don’t play music all the time. This is a funny one. Play it when the mood strikes you. I like classical or jazz or fun silly old-timey standards on a Sunday morning with coffee and the NY Times paper. Music is powerful stuff, and should not be a mere constant opiate for our brains, but something that adds inspiration and joy, not background clutter.
9. Take your shoes off before you come in. They’ve been everywhere. Poop, pee, chemicals are on them—all of them. Don’t put them on your dear couch or bed. Even on the floors, the baby or dog or cat or child playing with their toys will be right in where your shoes were right in.
10. Antiques, secondhand, from Marketplace or Antique shops or thrift shops or vintage shops…their quality is high, their affordability is often high, and they last 100s of years. Introduce them to your home instead of new, off-gassing, toxic, cheap particle board crap from Target or Ikea. Don’t get things shipped in styrofoam and plastic from Amazon…feed the local wolf, shop locally, and your community will blossom all that much more.
11. Buy plants from yard sales. Plants can be expensive. Pots can be expensive. Get them secondhand, take good care of them (those buckets of water will be there to nourish them) and put them in just about every room. The air quality will brighten, and your eye and then soul will brighten, seeing them.
12. Don’t replace quality craftsmanship, like lath and plaster, with drywall, which again offgasses. Invest in your home, don’t take quality out. This is deceptively easy to get wrong. Love up your house, don’t hack away at it. Don’t paint the original wood. Do restore the original staircase, that is teetering and tottering and, below, entirely replaced by a wall. Add stained glass in a few spots that want more light, but enjoy privacy.
13. Take off curtains if they’re plastic, poly, add only natural materials. Wake up slowly with the light. Keep your phone away from your couch, if you’re enjoying a movie. One screen at a time. Keep your phone out of your bedroom. Make sure your mattress and pillows and sheets are all natural. Make sure there are cozy, all natural rugs everywhere you or your animal friend might like a quieter, softer, warmer feel. Rugs, again, can be affordable secondhand. Clean them regularly by taking them outside and shaking them.
14. When it’s time, take off that vinyl siding that scared off other buyers and restore the old good wood walls and paint it in light, bright, strong, fun colors—light roof (I like metal, it’s recycled and recyclable—asphalt is toxic stuff and sheds with every storm into your yard and earth) and light walls will reduce the heat in your neighborhood. All roofs should be light, especially. I like vermilion, vanilla, butter yellow, white together. But you may like other things. Look at houses and color combinations that excite your eye and inspire your heart.
15. Clean the dirty windows, your views will open up and surprise you. When you’ve cleaned and loved your house up, then open up all the cardboard boxes with paper tape (no plastic in moving is necessary) and arrange your books. Make the guest room or children’s rooms or baby’s room or your primary room all joys to be in—with good views and fun areas for things you’d like to do. Each room deserves attention, and attention is love. And love is so much fun. And fun is much more fun than living in an an unloved home.
16. In your bathrooms, toothpaste tabs or eco soap, shampoo and conditioner bars can all replace toxic, throwaway plastic that’s generally not truly recyclable.
17. Sit on the front stoop, or porch swing, or lean out the window, and meet your neighbors. Nod at them. Read a book, and forget to look up, or do look up and connect. If you have a dog, invite some dogs over for playdates, and they’ll get the zoomies together after a minute of checking each other out.
18. Dogs do best not meeting each other pulling at their leashes, stuck face to face. Let them smell one another and rotate like a yin yang, then decide to play and jump and wrestle. It’s how they get tired, which is how they can be happy—not being stuck alone indoors or in a backyard. Take your dog with you on your bike to a cafe or park or bookshop.
19. When you’re at the bookshop, buy three books—one for you, and two for your family, or a friend. “No thanks,” when they offer a bag. We have enough bags. Bring your own bag, bring your own mug, and ask your local cafes if they offer organic or fair-trade, as the alternative means poison and slavery and child labor. Which sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not—that’s how inured we are to the normalization of ill-doing in our society. Children are not inured to doing bad things, or supporting bad things, and if given the chance and respectful teaching and guidance their caring and activism will inspire yours.
Your home should inspire you toward wholesome, earthy goodness and caring, and if it does, it will inspire others, too.
May it be of benefit!
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